Although the brain represents just 2 per cent of body weight, it consumes about 20 per cent of our energy at rest. Every ...

Where centralised societies excel at extraction, African fractal systems allow for circulation, reciprocity and return ...

Crafting each frame by hand, an animator paints the story of an Olympic swimmer’s return after surviving the Holocaust ...

is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Otago, as well as an external research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is interested in understanding ...

Twice a day, for a total of 19 months during the 1920s, the American vaudeville performer Edward H Gibson would get up on stage and perform a death-defying routine. The man billed as ‘The Human ...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures ...

It’s a question that’s reverberated through the ages – are humans, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures? Or are we, deep down, wired to be bad, blinkered, idle, vain, ...

Empathy, the sharing of feelings with another person and consequently caring about them, is typically a virtue in our society. ‘I hear you’ and ‘I feel your pain’ are said with a sense of compassion ...

Take a kaleidoscopic journey through the early history of film, inspired by an enduring fascination with motion and form ...

The mystical insight came to Nietzsche like a lightning flash: time eternally recurs – and life must be lived accordingly ...

The cover of New Scientist magazine 50 years ago showed a picture of a rhesus monkey, with the headline ‘A Blind Monkey That Sees Everything’. The monkey, named Helen, was part of a study into the ...